A Stradivarius violin, missing for nearly 30 years, has been returned to University of California, Los Angeles - but it remains under a legal cloud and its unlikely saga apparently is far from over.
The 262-year-old violin, believed to be a Stradivarius known by the name of one of its famous owners, the Duke of Alcantara, vanished mysteriously in 1967 shortly after the university received it as a gift.David Margetts, at the time a second violinist for the chancellor's quartet, thinks someone may have taken the instrument - one of the 500 crafted by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona, Italy, that still exists - from his car when he stopped at a convenience store for a snack one summer evening.
"I thought, `Oh my gosh, he didn't know what he took and he's going to throw it away,' " Margetts said Monday. "I felt like I was betraying a trust. There is no replacement for an instrument of that caliber."
A lost property report filed with police and notices circulated to pawn shops yielded nothing concerning the violin - valued at up to several hundred thousand dollars.
Then last January, the university got an unexpected call from the owner of a Petaluma, Calif., violin shop.
Joseph Grubaugh, who with his wife Sigrun Seifert runs the shop, had been asked by a local music teacher to examine a student's violin.
"We looked at it and probably 40 seconds later" knew it was the real thing, Grubaugh said.
Grubaugh and Seifert, members of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers, found the Duke of Alcantara on a list of more than 500 missing and stolen instruments provided by the organization. They said they reported it to UCLA after returning the instrument to the teacher.
Since then, UCLA and Teresa Salvato of Riverside, Calif. - the violin student - have been in a legal tug-of-war over ownership of the pedigreed violin.
Salvato returned the instrument to UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History last week under a court order that forbids either side from transferring it, trading it, playing it or inspecting it until court proceedings are completed.
Salvato, an amateur violinist who won the instrument in a divorce settlement after playing it for about 14 years during her marriage, wants to keep it, said Allen Hyman, Salvato's attorney.
"You can lose something, someone can find it and sell it to someone else who has no knowledge that it was lost and they can own it," Hyman contended Monday.
The violin was apparently bequeathed to Salvato's ex-husband by an aunt who had owned a music store, Hyman said. How the aunt came to possess 25 to 30 years ago is unclear, he said.
But, UCLA wants the only Stradivarius believed ever owned by the university, too.
"Our goal is to get the violin back, our singular goal," said Ruth Simon, a member of the UCLA legal team arguing the case.
Attorneys representing the university and Salvato will meet during the next several weeks to try to settle the debate. If a settlement is unsuccessful, the case will go to Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Although Margetts said he understands Salvato's attachment to the instrument - remembering the feel of the strings underneath his own fingers - he argued the violin belongs to posterity.
"A fiddle like the Strad doesn't belong to anybody," Margetts said. "Justice demands that those works of art are public domain, really. I mean, who owns the Mona Lisa?"